Sublime

duplicitous

"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

she is awake to her blood loss and therefore just beginning to live.

Louisa May Alcott. Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sarah Orne Jewett. Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first Black woman doctor in America, who started her practice to provide medical care to freed slaves after the Civil War.

“I had much rather starve in England, a free woman than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”

“I have a pain in my mother.” Augustine could identify. But that pain might be a symptom of a deeper issue—the challenge of negotiating an identity without effacing the dependence that makes us human. Mothers are a reminder of both, which is why they are so often a foil.

eked

Have I allowed myself to be so lulled, so infantilised by the ever-present, always anticipated service of this luxury resort that I have surrendered my free will, my judgement?

anathema